somenickname writes: As a long time Slashdot reader, I'm wondering what website to transition to once the beta goes live. The new beta interface seems very well suited to tablets/phones but, it ignores the fact that the user base is, as one would expect, nerds sitting in front of very large LCD monitors and wasting their employers time. It's entirely possible that the browser ID information gathered by the site has indicated that they get far more hits on mobile devices where the new interface is reasonable but, I feel that no one has analyzed the browser ID (and screen resolution) against comments modded +5. I think you will find that most +5 comments are coming from devices (real fucking computers) that the new interface does not support well. Without an interface that invites the kind of users that post +5 comments, Slashdot is just a ho-hum news aggregation site that allows comments. So, my question is, once the beta is the default, where should Slashdot users go to?

sholto writes: "Despite all the press, Dropbox has never volunteered its availability. Collating 264,000+ logs from site monitoring service Pingdom during the last six months of 2012 showed the cloud storage provider was down for 412 minutes, thanks to a very bad Christmas (106 minutes down in 48 hours). Network issues added another 574 minutes. The final score? Depends how you count it.
"Link to Original Source

angry tapir writes: "When Oracle purchased Sun, many in the open source community were bleak about the future of MySQL. According to MySQL co-creator Michael "Monty" Widenius, these fears have been proven by Oracle's attitude to MySQL and its community. In the wake of the Sun takeover, Monty forked MySQL to create MariaDB, which has picked up momentum (being included by default in Fedora, Open SUSE and, most recently, Slackware). I recently interviewed Monty about what he learned from the MySQL experience and the current state of MariaDB."Link to Original Source

Regardless of right or wrong, believing in something does not make it so.
While I do indeed believe in a creator God, that does not cause him to exist- while I am completely confident that I am correct, I may not be
While you do not believe in a creator God, that also does not cause his existence to be a false premise.

While I totally respect others who don't see things my way, I just find it ironic that most of the people whining about there being folks out there who believe in something are using the same "delusion" -if you will- to convince them that they are correct. No matter what you believe, there's never really a way to prove it by science alone in it's current state of study.

Zothecula writes: Anyone who has a attended a LAN party — where people connect their computers on one network in one location to play multiplayer games together — can tell you that they can be both very fun but also kind of a hassle. Playing games with your friends all in the same room: fun. Having to organize all your friends to each haul their usually-oversized gaming rigs to one person's house, ensuring they all have the same software, and inevitably dealing with one or more people having trouble connecting: not fun. With that in mind, it makes sense that one Google employee decided to bypass all that inconvenience and just build a house specifically for LAN parties, complete with multiple networked computers and TVs connected to game consoles.Link to Original Source

I also have my primary data, my backup local data on another hard Drive and for my very important stuff, I will be getting BD-R copies (family video and pictures)

Carbonite is insurance.

Certainly, but how many "Joe Home Users" are going to any effort to encrypt their data? Obviously, there's no excuse when we know the pitfalls, but the point is, look at how all these cloud services are marketed and see if any of these drawbacks are even mentioned. The 'cloud' is just talked up like it's the next wheel, but no one even knows what the hell they're talking about, or what the potential risks are!

It's irresponsibility like this that keeps me from embracing the cloud like I want to. I don't trust anyone, so I'm actually thinking of building my own personal cloud infrastructure to store my stuff offsite, email, etc.

Well, according to Wikipedia, "[private clouds]...have attracted criticism because users "still have to buy, build, and manage them" and thus do not benefit from lower up-front capital costs and less hands-on management, essentially "[lacking] the economic model that makes cloud computing such an intriguing concept"
Translation: Being smart and responsible with our data costs money- how can we make it cost less money.
At some point, you drop the 'smart', and 'responsibility' part in order to make room for the 'cost less money' part. If someone's moving to the cloud is driven by nothing but trying to cut costs, they're already in the soup.
I personally have found the idea of a private cloud to be a winner, and a number of organizations have joined up to create their own cloud. I'm currently working on a project called the "Metronet" in South Bend, IN http://www.metronetzing.org/ which does exactly this. I recommend you keep looking into the idea. There are some really cool opportunities out there.

But why? I think if either of them actually cared about rights to privacy, etc., they wouldn't be recommending this kind of shit to their listeners/viewers. We see once again that they are just puppets controlled by strings of money. It's not about actually recommending a good product to the consumer, but making sure that commission check is as large as possible.

Just solidifies my opinion that Carbonite is an irresponsible company, and I've been saying this for a while- this is just an example. You think that trusting all the data on your computer to a company who can't even keep your email address or other account information safe is a good idea?
Cloud backup is irresponsible to start with. Off-site MANAGED backups are fine, but just throwing all your data out into the ether and expecting it to be safe is asinine. What will it take for people to stop *giving* away their data?